From The New York Times Magazine, a profile of the brilliant Christopher Guest:The Shape-Shifter
By ALEX WITCHELHe didn’t talk much the first day. He didn’t talk much the second day. As I understand it, he doesn’t talk much most days. But in our 48 hours together, Christopher Guest showed me his childhood, fell in love — with a guitar — and even did comedy. With me as the straight man.
On our second day, as he sat on a couch at Mandolin Brothers, the venerable guitar store on Staten Island and the kind of mecca for him that Harry Winston is for Elizabeth Taylor, I also saw an aspect of how he makes the movies he directs, writes and acts in. He held his newest object of affection, what he called a “bizarre combination of a Gibson body and a National neck,” and in front of him stood Stan Jay, the store’s owner, wearing a blue shirt printed with yellow half moons and clouds. “My wife makes all my shirts,” he told Guest proudly. “She has her own company, Bea Jay Jeans, because her name is Beatrice Jay. See?” He showed Guest the label.
Guest nodded and Jay kept going, and the more intently Guest listened, the more earnestly Jay spoke, and it was a shame there was no camera, because while it looked as if Guest were only strumming a guitar, murmuring, “Is that so?” he was just as surely shaping a character who was delivering the monologue of his life. Like every character in a Christopher Guest movie, Jay had his dreams, albeit small ones: he wanted Guest to buy a guitar (he bought the banjo here that he learned to play for “A Mighty Wind”); and he wanted him to visit the guys downstairs in the repair shop. Done and done.
In Guest’s films, beloved by so many that they can recite the lines by heart, his characters also have dreams, though grander and harder to realize. In “Waiting for Guffman,” the citizens of Blaine, Mo., want their community-theater production to move to Broadway; in “Best in Show,” a variety of dog owners push their pooches to win top prize at a Westminster-like show; in “A Mighty Wind,” three folk acts whose 15 minutes of fame expired 35 years earlier get a crack at a comeback; in “This Is Spinal Tap,” which was directed by Rob Reiner and written by Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Reiner, washed-up rockers give a doomed comeback tour their all.
Like the writer and director Preston Sturges (“The Palm Beach Story,” “The Lady Eve”), whose wacky characters cherish their American dreams as lofty as building an airport suspended over a city or as low as cheating at cards, Guest has respect and affection for the oddballs he creates. No matter how absurd their circumstances, he always takes them seriously, which only makes them funnier. Their wrenching heartbreaks and tiny triumphs make them exactly like us.
His latest film, “For Your Consideration,” a scathing sendup of award-season hype that opens on Friday, employs his usual repertory of actors — McKean, Shearer, Eugene Levy (who has co-written most of Guest’s films), Parker Posey, Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara, among them. Guest’s movies take months to write, as he and Levy painstakingly develop characters and plot. In “Consideration,” the unlikely Oscar candidate is the independent film “Home for Purim,” a hokey melodrama about a Southern-Jewish family in the 1940s and a dying mother’s reconciliation with her lesbian daughter. Guest and Levy conceived the film-within-the-film to be written by two self-important hacks (played by McKean and Bob Balaban), community-college professors whose pretensions and limitations were explored so completely that Guest and Levy even wrote the titles for 27 of the fictional duo’s plays. As in all Guest films, the parts were created with each actor in mind. When the outlines were finished, the actors offered input into their characters’ costumes, cars, even the set designs for their homes. Then they improvised their dialogue.
“By that point, Gene and I have written hundreds of cards delineating what happens in every scene,” Guest told me. “We have no rehearsal, just turn on the camera and people start talking.” (In the new film, the “Home for Purim” scenes are scripted).
Guest, who is 58, discussed “For Your Consideration” on our first day together at the Carlyle Hotel. He had flown in from the Toronto Film Festival and, because his room wasn’t ready, was given a suite for his interview. It was surprising to discover that he has white hair, though when you stop to think about it, it’s hard to pinpoint what Guest really looks like. He has appeared in all but the first of his films, “The Big Picture,” which starred Kevin Bacon, and he is such a chameleon — in “Consideration,” he plays Jay Berman, the director of “Home for Purim,” as an arty slob with a cartoonish haircut — that it was disconcerting to find him tall and slim, polite and dignified. He barely cracked a smile for the better part of two days, so the web of fine lines around his slate blue eyes was unexpected. He must laugh sometime.
What he did do was speak in a variety of accents and deliver countless impressions, including one of his father, distinguished and distant; George Burns, whispery and hair-raisingly accurate; and Alan Arkin, a voice Guest describes as “impatiently intelligent” (and very New York). It became clear that Guest’s primary way of experiencing the world is through sound. He seems to carry thousands of voices in his head, and each reveals an almost eerily realized character. The character that is Christopher Guest — smart, dry, fiercely emotional about his family and work and just as fiercely hidden — prefers a back seat, especially when he has the chance to praise his repertory company.
“A reporter once asked, ‘Is there someone you wish you could get on these movies?’ ” Guest recalled, settling on the couch. “I think in the back of his mind was, ‘This poor guy, he can’t get Angelina Jolie.’ And of course, these are the most talented people at what they do walking the earth.”
It was the Hollywood-star mentality, in all its magnified seventh-grade glory, that drove Guest to make “For Your Consideration.”
“People have said to me, ‘Gee, a guy in the dry cleaner said I should get an Academy Award for that thing I did,’ ” Guest said. “ ‘And you know, it was pretty good.’ And I say, ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t go to that dry cleaner.’ ”
Guest’s first nomination of any kind was for an Obie Award for music he wrote with Paul Jacobs for the Off Broadway show “National Lampoon’s Lemmings,” in 1973. He never did find out if they won, he said, because the category was omitted during the ceremony. Then he and other Lampoon writers were nominated for three Grammys for their comedy records. “The first year, Cheech and Chong won,” Guest said. “Second year, Richard Pryor. Third year, Richard Pryor. And I thought, This isn’t fun at all.”
In 1976 he won an Emmy for writing a Lily Tomlin special, and he eventually did win a Grammy, in 2004, with Eugene Levy and Michael McKean, for the title song of “A Mighty Wind.” “I was struck by what happens to your psyche being nominated, the disruption of it,” Guest said. “But the reason I don’t look at this as just a movie about Hollywood is this could happen in any world — the Nobel Prize or the Booker Prize, anything — where people are in such a delicate state in terms of their esteem that there is no way to process the information.”
When he acts, Guest creates a character starting with the voice, an obsession he honed growing up in New York City, where he spent his free time in the bathroom. “There was some echo with the tile, so I could practice voices,” he said. When his parents took him out to dinner, he would listen to a waiter recite the specials, then order in the waiter’s voice, to the dismay of his father, Lord Peter Haden-Guest, then editorial director of the United Nations, and his mother, Jean Haden-Guest, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who was a vice president of casting and talent at CBS. Guest grew up in Greenwich Village and went to the Little Red School House, P.S. 41 and the High School of Music and Art. After two years there, he left for the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts, where he played in Arlo Guthrie’s band and auditioned for the School of the Arts at N.Y.U.
“I did one of George’s monologues from ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ ” Guest said and sighed. “You know when you’re young you have this unbelievable stupidity and arrogance and ignorance all mixed in? Of course, it was meant to be done by a 50-year-old man. There was a panel of people, and someone said, ‘Are you willing to give your blood for the theater?’ And I thought, Wow, you know what? I don’t think so. I thought maybe there’d be some cute women, maybe in the acting class. What do you mean give my blood?
“So I went to Bard College for a year. And then, even though I didn’t think I should give my blood to the theater, I did go to N.Y.U., which is where I met Michael McKean. In my second year I auditioned for ‘Little Murders,’ which Alan Arkin was directing at Circle in the Square, and got a part.” Also in the cast were Fred Willard and Paul Benedict, another member of Guest’s repertory. (Guest kept working and eventually left school.) Although his real name is Christopher Haden-Guest, he changed it after an audition. “The director read the name aloud, he did this” — Guest made a face — “and said, ‘That’s a good one.’ And I said, ‘That’s actually my name.’ This speaks to my level of security at the time. I thought it sounded pretentious to them, so I dropped that part of it.”
Even so, when his father died in 1996, Guest succeeded to his title, becoming the fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling in the county of Essex. His wife of 22 years, Jamie Lee Curtis, is Lady Haden-Guest. (Although his half-brother from his father’s first marriage, the writer Anthony Haden-Guest, is older, he was not eligible, having been born out of wedlock.)
“Jamie calls the House of Lords ‘the lord thing,’ which is just right,” Guest said. “I actually went for a few years, before they kicked the hereditary peers out. My first day there I was lost. The corridors all look the same. The third time I go around, I see the same guard, who says, ‘Perhaps my lord would like a compass.’ With just a little smile on his face. That was worth the whole thing. I thought, Now we can go home.” But not before Curtis visited the gift shop and loaded up on barbecue aprons, oven mitts and matches, all with the House of Lords insignia. +
Guest stood, ready to check into his own room. “People ask me, ‘What’s your next film?’ And I never know,” he said. “I truly don’t have an idea now, and it may take another year before I do. There seems to be some organic inner timing where I need the time off. That’s the way it’s always been.”
Which is fine with Martin Shafer, chairman and C.E.O. of Castle Rock Entertainment — the company that has produced all of Guest’s films since “Guffman.” “Chris is not at all obsessed with himself or his movies,” Shafer said by phone. “He’s whatever the opposite of egotistical is. We’ve done 100 movies, and on each opening day I’m on the phone with the director giving the grosses. I ask Chris, ‘You want me to call you tonight and tell you how it did?’ And he says, ‘No, we can talk next week.’
“Some of the films will do better, some will do worse,” Shafer continued. “But he’s creating a body of work that’s exceptional. He’s also an economic filmmaker who doesn’t go a penny over. If he says $8 million, it’s $8 million. If he says the shoot is 24 days, it’s not 25 days. He has total control, and he never abuses that.”
Inside the elevator stood an elegant woman holding a small dog, and the elevator operator. Guest put his hand out, and the dog licked it effusively, in spasms of glee.
“Oh, well,” Guest said and hung his saturated hand out to dry while the elevator operator tried not to laugh. The woman insisted, “It’s O.K, he’s clean.” I started to laugh. The door opened on his floor, and Guest turned to me, extending his hand, shiny with dog spit. He looked me straight in the eye, deadpan, and with the slightest lift of his eyebrow, pulled me into the joke. In that wordless moment he seemed more entirely present and connected than he had been in any of the 90 minutes that preceded it. I could see by his expression that the moment was also mine to refuse, no harm done. I clasped his hand firmly and he stifled his smile, muttering pleasantries, and got out. As the door closed behind him, both the woman and the elevator operator looked embarrassed for me, stupid enough to have taken his soiled hand, and kept their eyes on the floor. The dog, however, panted at me eagerly. He smelled his friend.
The next day, at Mandolin Brothers, Guest said, “I’ve been buying guitars since 1964, and you fool yourself into thinking it’s the last one.” He strummed. “This is way too loud and way too good sounding.”
Sitting beside him was David Nichtern, Guest’s best friend since childhood. On their first day of nursery school, a bully threatened to beat up Nichtern and was beaten up by Guest instead. At 13, they started playing guitar together in Washington Square Park. Nichtern is a musician and composer who wrote the song “Midnight at the Oasis.” The two have a shorthand of baseball statistics, musical references, old jokes based on Guest’s impressions and the kind of long, easy silences Guest treasures.
They sat in what Guest called “the grown-up room,” for serious connoisseurs. Stan Jay brought out a succession of vintage guitars and mandolins, and as the two men played, customers peeked inside. Guest pretended not to notice. The previous day we talked about fame and how little he enjoys it.
“My wife actually can’t walk down the street without being recognized,” he said. “I can now, quite easily, but when I was on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in the mid ’80s, I couldn’t, and I didn’t like it. Obviously, I’m not as comfortable as Jamie is. You’ll turn around and she has her arms around three people and they’re taking pictures and she’s saying, ‘No, I like to make it with more tomato sauce.’ ”
Curtis last starred in the movie “Christmas With the Kranks,” in 2004, and she has built a career as a best-selling children’s-book author. So she and Guest both have to travel. “I don’t think I’ve ever been separated from Jamie for more than two weeks in 22 years,” Guest said. “That was always a rule, first as a couple, then as a family. And we’ve stuck to it.” They have two adopted children, Annie, 19, and Tom, 10.
I met with Curtis two weeks later at the Mark Hotel, while she was in New York to promote her latest book. Unlike Guest, who can be both ambling and perfunctory, Curtis gets straight to the point. I told her it was hard to imagine her reserved husband’s relationship with her flamboyant father, the actor Tony Curtis.
“He has none,” she said bluntly. “My father behaved badly once in front of Chris’s family and my daughter on her ninth birthday, and my husband has not spoken to him since. Correctly, by the way.”
While she’s used to the fact that Guest doesn’t talk or emote much, he can still crack her up. “We go to a function, like a charity dinner, and he starts moaning just loud enough for me to hear,” she said. “And I’m trying so hard not to laugh.” He is also, she says, an exceptionally kind person. “He sends a handwritten letter to every actor he has to cut out of his movies, even with the tiniest part,” she said. “He respects that process so much, and he does it so lovingly.”
While intimacy is not easy for Guest, Curtis added, “he’s never been more intimate than he is with his children, because children force you into it. Tom has a very vivid imagination, and with him Chris has invented an amalgam of characters from video and computer games, and they make up action-figure characters. Chris does the voice of every character. They have a fabulous time, it’s beautiful.” She smiled. “We have a collection of New Yorker cartoons, and one is a dinner-table scene where the father is holding up a cooked chicken. And he says, ‘Your mom cooks the chicken but your Dad makes it dance.’ Chris can make a chicken dance.”
It is that whimsy, tempered only by the insistence of human nature to exert itself, that characterizes Guest’s films, which are a departure from his baser beginnings in comedy. In a skit in “National Lampoon’s Lemmings,” he appeared as James Taylor and sang: “Farewell New York City/With your streets that flash like strobes/Farewell Carolina/Where I left my frontal lobes.”
He winced at the mention. “James Taylor came to the show with Carly Simon, and she was laughing and he wasn’t,” he said. “As a joke, it was a major cheap shot. They came backstage, and I was devastated, because he was such a hero to me. As a satirist you’re not supposed to care about that. I guess what I’m doing now really represents who I am and always was. It just took a while to happen.”
Meanwhile, Jay brought out more guitars for him and Nichtern to try, until Guest went back to the one he liked and they played bluegrass, side by side. The instruments were glorious, and the two men were swept up in the sound, the rush of playing they’ve been experiencing together for 45 years. Their energy soared with the music, and Guest kept his eyes closed in the swell of the moment, because this music, this moment, was his family, his passion, his history. The room was as packed with emotion, raw and exposed, as it possibly could be, and Guest didn’t have to say a word. He should have smiled. Life was good.
Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine.
